How to Set a Stain:

On Lisa Robertson’s ‘The Baudelaire Fractal’

A review by E. C. Messer

 

Lisa Robertson, “The Baudelaire Fractal”
Coach House Books
160 pages, softcover, $22.95
 

Things rarely happen as described. Any poet or trial lawyer will tell you that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable—we don’t remember what we don’t remember. There is another reality beyond the faulty work of our outward senses, a way through to understanding or at least feeling, toward anger and desire and fullness. Maps can be found everywhere—in paintings, on park benches, within the weave of cloth or the skillful human approximation of tailoring. “The Baudelaire Fractal” is one such map (or as they say in French, one of the few words I know, plan, as in plan de Paris. As in “I plan not to get lost in Paris.” The utter optimism of that statement.)

I should apologize in advance—I’m not writing this for you, dear Reader, as Robertson refers to you with loving capitalization in the book itself. I don’t work for the breathless followers of contemporary poetry whose Google alerts have apprised them of a new marquee publication, nor the lonely cinéastes who devoured “Cinema of the Present” with unforeseen relish and have since waited patiently for another diegetic effort, ignoring “3 Summers” and picking up this latest offering with the hope that the titular “Baudelaire” turns out to be an obscure silent actor from Pabst or Sternberg. I am curious about the reader of online literary journals, but I do not write for them, either. In general there are two kinds of people who read book reviews: those who want to know whether or not to read the book, and those who have read it and want to know if you, the reviewer, are wrong. I am neither right nor wrong—and you should, without question, read the book.

But that is beside the point. I’m writing this for Lisa Robertson herself, whose earlier “Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture” I sweatingly pressed into the hands of unsuspecting book-buyers across three San Francisco neighborhoods, pointing to my staff recommendation by way of explanation and authority. It was small and portable. It generously offered you pictures as well as words, even more important now than it was then. It could give you the seven walks it promised, spread out across countless bus rides and BART delays and pauses between the endless touching of phones (a phenomenon that grew from newness to ubiquity during the time of my advocacy). Even the start of its delightfully baroque title, “Occasional Work,” isn’t too daunting a commitment. This can be said of all of Lisa Robertson’s books, that they are easy companions—not because their contents are slight, but because they arise from an intimacy of author and authored that transfers itself to the lucky reader.

So it is unsurprising, given this affinity, that Hazel Brown, the Baudelairian avatar of Robertson’s first novel (I use this term with an asterisk, because it’s what the book’s packaging calls it, but I would strongly advise against preoccupations of genre) should wake one morning Gregor Samsa-like, to find herself the author of the works of Baudelaire. This metamorphosis, albeit a much pleasanter one, though not without its sacrifices (every vermin and female poet gets an apple in her back), is traced both backwards and forwards in time though piquant narrative punctuated with lilting, almost musical philosophy. The narrative is autobiographically intimate, though there is no explicit justification for uniting speaker and author. More importantly, the truth of the poet’s experience, from her earliest ardent seeking to a mature adoption and exploration of the Baudelairian authorship—elderly dog, French country cottage, overripe cherries complementing her dual identity—seeps out of the text through each detail and bleeds into the aggregate theory that follows.

As I write this, I have a whole chicken roasting hot and slow in one of my two ovens. I am everything Hazel Brown is not—domestic, monolingual, possessive. She is a nomad, unstuck in time and place except through recollection and the examination of well-kept diaries. But in other ways we are not dissimilar; the soft, imitation-knit synthetic of my Goodwill skirt is pilling slightly, the dandiacal vest bought off eBay, reversible deep red or blue-green with vertical black stripes in common, fits tightly across my breasts, making it impossible to wear with ties as I had intended. Yet it is among my favorite articles of clothing. Hazel Brown, girl that she is by her own identification (she eludes pronouns), is unafraid to define herself by garment. She and I have both been split open cross-wise. I too carry Modern Library editions as talismans; I too have searched for a language that doesn’t taste like other people’s fingers.

This book will be called feminist, meaning that it is written in its own language. Like so many novels by poets, or those with an inherently poetic nature, it teaches you how to read it as you go along. In that sense, too, Hazel Brown is a poet who has been written by a novel. The text is the garment she dons to become the author of Baudelaire’s works. I read it from start to finish twice in succession, which was enjoyable but not what I’d recommend. Better still to give it one solid reading, then keep it around, somewhere convenient like a desk or dining table. Dip back in at the points you remember or have dog-eared or pencil-marked—the unexpectedly lavish breakfast at the Polish veterans’ hostel in London, the stain on the restaurant chair that becomes a geography, the moths in Baudelaire’s morning jacket—until you come to know the book’s architecture, the way that a new house or apartment, at some indeterminate time you can only recognize once it’s passed, becomes the place where you unquestionably live. The fabric of “The Baudelaire Fractal”—and it is most definitely a fabric, not just text but textile—is no less yours because it was thrifted. Learn to live in it. You won’t regret it, despite the lingering scent of shed self.

 

E.C. Messer lives in San Francisco and Pismo Beach, CA with her husband and four cats, one of whom has a bionic heart. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ecmesser. She would like very much to know you.